


Black Moth

by SkyHighDisco



Series: Grey Novelette [1]
Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: AU, Angst, Give Hammond a hug, Horror, Hospital, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, James May's Mail Time, Mystery, Old Top Gear, Rimac crash, the grand tour - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:48:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25067923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyHighDisco/pseuds/SkyHighDisco
Summary: Richard Hammond never told anyone what he had seen betweenRimacstopping its tumble down the slope and him crawling out before it burst to flames.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond & James May, Richard Hammond & James May
Series: Grey Novelette [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832563
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Black Moth

**Author's Note:**

> First TG/TGT fic I ever did and probably will ever do. I got hooked on the show just recently and decided to use this oneshot for a little practice. It's set in a specific AU multiverse which I hope will come to exist soon.
> 
> EDIT: Credit for the wonderful cover goes to a friend I've known since diapers. She's a hero for putting up with my indecisive mind. <3

This is the first one.

He had never dreamed quite anything like this.

The weirdest dream he ever had was juggling cones with his dog. That’s as far into the weird as they go. Others simply include driving. With other two, with Mindy, with his daughters, by himself… Driving down the roads, up the mountain peaks, over the suspense bridges, ropes stretched over gaping gorges, Jeremy bound up and gagged struggling in the middle of the macadam, completely unable to complain about airport security ever again…

However, this one wakes him up with a start and he quickly grabs the nearest pen and piece of paper, which happened to be a restaurant pamphlet, to scribble down its contents before they evaporate into limbo.

He dreams of metallic structures he cannot describe even with his boastfully colourful vocabulary span. He dreams of a semi-circular seating that grows in height as it goes backwards akin to a colosseum filled with dozens, maybe a hundred blindfolded people who differed from the next to the utmost extent in age, race and gender. He dreams of an old ship the size of a continent. He dreams of a murky, sickly red, grey and black landscape, like the inside of a beast.

That last part in particular appears very familiar.

Richard is a walking shell for the rest of the day. He’s distracted because the portions of the weird dream he woke up from this morning bring him back elsewhere; somewhere very unexpected and wince-inducing. At the very thought his head and left knee begin to pulsate and he wishes to crawl into a hole and drown in panicked trembles.

“I told you your coffee machine is shite.”

Hammond blinks himself back. Looks up at Jeremy. It’s like looking up at a looming tower and it’s annoying. Tall bastard.

“Huh?” he asks stupidly. They are in _Drivetribe_ office, preparing to film an announcement. Richard barely skimmed his eyes over what exactly it was so he immediately disregarded it. Seeing Clarkson reminds him he isn’t quite done with it yet.

“Your coffee machine”, Jeremy repeats himself. “The one you bought recently. It’s no good.”

“Why?”

“Because whatever coffee is inside is obviously so bad that you’re still half asleep. Come on, work with me, Hammond. Admittedly, you’re not fast in a car, but you’re a dynamo when it comes to comeback remarks.”

“That doesn’t make any sense”, Richard’s brain attempts to defend itself.

“U-huh”, Clarkson’s eyebrows are telling him he’s not getting away with it that easy. “Nice try. What’s going on?”

“What _is_ going on?”

James approaches. He’s holding a metal flask. Richard doesn’t have to be at his best to know the liquid that crouched in there wasn’t coffee. He’s dressed in one of his irritating floral button-ups and the look in his eyes resembles something akin to curiosity, if something like that is possible for James May.

Richard doesn’t know what to say. What _could_ he say? James would just mock him, the heartless bastard he is. He would enlist all the evidence about how stupid he was acting, and would probably roast him worse than Jeremy. Jezza would mock him, too, although he _would_ ask if he was okay once he'd had his fun. But for either of them to believe him? No. No, they wouldn't.

Mindy, his wife and life-long friend, would accuse him of making shite up and to stop talking rubbish. So she was out, too. It is unbelievable to him, to keep something from his other half, but Richard still has trouble deciphering it himself.

Yet when he tries to recall it, he can see it all, clear as day. His muscles, stiff from nervousness. Fingers turning white from the grip he has on the wheel. The moment his heart literally stops when _Rimac_ loses control and the sound of metal railing breaking under the sheer mass of the car, augmented further by its velocity. He remembers a faint, startled half-gasp, half-cry he makes, and whatever sound he was meaning to instinctively produce next is buried in the vile tumbling of a spinning supercar.

At some point between the impacts bouncing off the helmet combined with his vestibular system going ballistic, he probably blacked out because after the memory hole was crossed, the first thing he remembers is mad pain in his left knee. The feeling is almost devouring. It is so strong that he doesn't dare open his eyes for a few moments, but when he notices one thing, it would quickly make him change his mind.

It is so confounding and unidentifiable that he has trouble describing it at first, but then it strikes him, above sore head and turbid mind, collecting knowledge from all documentaries he had ever presented.

The gravity is wrong.

He feels as if his own weight is crushing him down into the hard, solid ground. It pulls him under, towards it, like a huge magnet that is able to detect iron in blood and hold onto it.

Richard opens his eyes. Heavily. The air is stiff. It’s choking him. He grits his teeth to try and divide the pain. He is laying on a hard surface, and it’s too flat to be a car. There are no Swiss highlands or pure, oxygen-injected air. The sky is clothed into a sickly red hue, dark and clouded. Because of the thick cover, he doesn’t see the source of light, but even so, he knows it is far dimmer than normal. Air is heavy and moist, and he can hear faint humming all around him and he can’t categorize it.

Surprisingly, he isn’t alarmed as he perhaps should be. Wherever this is, it’s far, far from home. Very far.

Investing all strength he had left, Hammond straightens up on one elbow. Energy he has to use combined with knee pain and moist, heavy air have him sweating like crazy. Blinking away, he looks.

His left knee is completely shattered to unrecognizability. There is no sign of how a normal knee should look like, even under so much blood. It is stroke-inducing to look at, which Hammond feels very nearly identified with. Dark liquid spilling from and around it looks even darker, and it oozes freely on the cold, metallic surface.

Richard stares, waiting to feel something other than screeching pain, something to link it to the scene he is seeing. But he is left empty. He waits for a normal reaction to his knee being gnawed to oblivion, but… it just isn’t coming. He can’t even force himself to panic. All there is is pain, and he doesn’t care.

But while he is looking about, there is an mass of something very firm, solid and invisible circling all around him other than an expansive surface of flat, time-bitten steel, like a straight metallic plate spreading to the edge of sight, accented by the thick, dark fog.

Hammond knows he is in motion. He is on the surface that is moving. Caresses of wind play with his messy hair, persistently. He felt it the same way once. When he was on a ship.

All of a sudden, there is a movement, somewhere ahead. In the fog. Richard whips his head that way.

He didn’t imagine it, like he didn’t imagine either of the things he was experiencing. It happened again. A brief, arched movement up front. When Richard looks up to certify it, the invisible feeling in the air immediately increases.

Everything seems to turn slow motion as the presenter watches an enormous shape make its way into view. The air suddenly thickens even more and Richard’s breath hitches in his throat.

The gloomy, depressing surroundings are then crowned by the arrival of a huge moth. It is bigger than a jet, and eerily, terrifyingly silent. The swipes of its enormous wings make no sound or wind gusts as it slowly descends closer and closer. It is dark grey, almost black, a smoky colour of an exhaust gas with just a hint of another colour on the right side of his abdomen, which Hammond will later, during many dull hours nailed to a hospital bed, identify as purple.

But the eyes… they are what jump-start Richard’s heart into a whirl, and they don’t make up for shock a single look on his shattered knee might’ve caused. Even so, when an emotion finally registers, it isn’t fright. It isn’t anything resembling that thing. It is the simplest, rawest kind of awe.

Eyes. Two huge, round, membrane-intertwined protruding orbs. No different than the ones of a regular moth. But there is something so remorseless, so nocuous, so unforgiving in them that it shadowed lovecraftian surroundings. Two balls of blackness tearing into his soul and savagely mauling it into bits, gluing him to the spot even more than the unorthodoxly strong gravity already was. Recalling it back now, Richard is convinced he was looking at the face of death.

While working on _Miracles of Nature_ , Richard had a chance to work with a beautiful barn owl. Her main ace, apart from being absolutely gorgeous, was the ability to nigh levitate in place without disturbing a single strand of air. He is now greeted with the same impression when watching this moth arrive which, with every swipe, arrows him with protuberances of strange beauty and grace.

Richard blankly stares, unmoving, completely captivated. He can see the moth’s mouth begin to open. A centrifugal drum of circular neede-like teeth packed in the black void. He isn’t sure if they are moving, but he can see the sort of rhythmic pulsating they induce, like compressing and expanding of lungs.

As the creature grows in size whilst approaching, the hole for mouth grows with it and Richard feels he’s growing lighter. Gravity is losing its firm grip on him and he is almost airborne. The pulsating pain in his knee is replaced by pleasant vibrations. His head is all empty and fuzzy and he almost smiles.

The hole expands until it’s a curtain covering the murky surroundings. Richard can see sharp, whisk-like teeth, and in the center of their ring, darkness — the only thing he wants the most in his life. He wants to touch it, feel its texture, become one with it. He wants to drown in this darkness.

And then, in a snap, it’s all over. His eyes fly open, he coughs, realizes he’s in excruciating pain, and groans, groans harder, yells. _Rimac_ is turned upside down on a slope and Richard’s hair is touching the St Gallen grass.

He looks at his knee. There’s not nearly as much blood as there was before, far from it. It almost looked poetically benign. But the pain is back and it’s worse. There is no moth.

All of a sudden, the presenter feels a sudden wave of fear washing over him and physically making him shudder, like information of the disturbing nature of the encounter finally hit him all at once, and the terror he was supposed to feel came to surface only now.

Hammond grits his teeth, pushes hard and does all he can not to faint as he wriggles out of the upturned window. He struggles, unconscious tears streaming down his cheeks, barely watching for sharp edges of broken glass and plastic. A few seconds later, the supercar is engulfed in flames.

The following hours are full of pain and possible blackouts, people rushing him to the helicopter on a fluorescent stretcher, clamouring in German, dull lovecraftian landscape, high-pitch of the helicopter propeller, heavy moist air, throbbing knee, black eyes, silent wings, black void.

Next thing he knows, he is okay. He’s in a hospital bed, left leg suspended upward, sedated with all possible medicine, a smiling James next to him with a bottle of gin, an offensive yellow-titled book and a word on his lips that Mindy has been notified and convinced that he’d be alright.

Richard’s puzzlement is probably the only thing that stops him from crying. His head is still in the same clouds when Jeremy arrives. He tells him that despite passing years, he is still a shit driver.

Richard suddenly realizes that his wife is going to kill him, and it becomes a new fix point to pack his fright in.

Eventually, as he recovers, he briefly forgets about the incident, because work is an excellent mind occupier, but it comes back to him quickly as he pivots on plastic crutches. And steers him to another world-turning stopper.

Wheel coming off. Tumble. Blackout. Blankness. His mind is a tower of glass, and there is nothing in it. He doesn’t know who he is.

He is angry, defensive, jumpy, threatened. He loses his temper and it scares Mindy, but the doctor says it was the part of the recovery. His daughters are still too small to understand what happened. Five-year-old Izzy squeals in horror when Richard shows her the scars and cries.

He actually can’t recognize Mindy. He claims his wife is French.

Richard only wants to know if the wheel breaking off of the jet car was his fault.

He rambles about a black moth crouching on the wall opposite his hospital bed and how the contrast between it and white wall is annoying. He says it’s the same one that he brushed off of the _Vampire_ ’s steering wheel before he took a seat.

Clarkson nudges May and says, “He’s seeing butterflies now.”

Richard doesn’t remember saying that. The others fill him up on it while he was crawling up the hillside of recovery.

It’s dawned on him before, but it does so unyieldingly yet again.

James was originally scheduled to drive the _Vampire_. If he hadn’t given the position off to his short friend, James May would’ve been dead. He would’ve been decapitated because of his height. And midget built, the prime source of affectionate bullying orchestrated by James and Jeremy, is what saved Richard’s life that day.

Hammond feels the same shiver he always does when he thinks of the fact. James May is crude. And slow. And a raw, cold-hearted bastard. But to hell with the world if Richard didn’t love him fiercely. He loved him like a blood brother. He loved him so much that the thought of losing him or Jeremy, was just too painful to bare, even as he would’ve never admitted it if it cost him his life. And he could have lost him just like that.

Richard tries to shake away the thoughts, but he can’t. When he’s alone, when he’s in a quiet, the _‘what if’s’_ and _‘might’ve been’s’_ strike him mercilessly like a shower of rocks. It almost seems that his vital functions fail every time he loses his way in them.

But amongst the incubus, Richard has the brains to uncover another fact, and he still doesn’t know where to put it.

The moth.

It’s getting closer each time. And it scares him.

Vastly.

But Richard can’t help but notice so far all it did was save his and other people’s lives.

He wonders if he would have woken up to crawl out of the supercar in time, if it had something to do with the fact that ultimately he would be the one to drive the _Vampire_ , and not James. He wonders if the things would’ve been different, if it weren’t for—

Something wet hits him in the face and Hammond jumps, every thought in his head dispersing like a cloud of smoke. He looks at his clean white shirt that is now drenched in brown liquid.

He had coffee splashed at him, and the culprit was right there: Clarkson is laughing and pointing at him like a six-year-old, wanting to know which far land had he daydreamed off to so he can hitch a ride. The crew is facepalming because now they have to have Hammond tidied up and readied _again_ , wasting more time than they already have. Sometimes they sympathize with BBC and wonder how in hell they made amends with these three together in one room.

  
  
  
  


It’s the last envelope.

As always, James May feels tired and a little bit peeved by now. He’s been opening packages for more than forty-five minutes — which will later be edited to something between fifteen and twenty-five minutes long — and he woke up with a swollen sinus. More so, some idiot decided he should plunge the nose of his car in front of May’s on a two-way crossing on the way to the office and James demonstrated his frustration through a solid, long press on the honk and a loud swear which the moron regrettably couldn’t catch. And the coffee was wishy-washy, too.

Still, he did what he had to do for the sake of the viewers. They’re here for entertainment and for some reason, find it exactly entertaining listening to him babbling about rubbish.

“No indication of sender”, he mutters out loud for the gig and with already practiced ease, cuts through the edge with a gifted letter-opener. Pulls out the paper. It’s a standard folded A4 and James unfolds it, rotates it to the direction he thinks is right.

He stares.

Doesn’t understand.

There have been a lot of things he was getting in _Mail Time_ that he didn’t understand, and yet he was always quick to judge which of these are for rubbish bin.

But this makes him frown.

It confounds him completely.

“It’s a butterfly. I think.”

James faces the paper towards the camera. “It’s a black butterfly drawing. Don’t know what it is, but it’s nice. I think it’s…” he turns himself halfway around so he can see it, and still allow the camera to capture it, and sets a philosophic expression to examine the content. “That’s coal, I believe. I don’t want to trace my finger across it, else I might smear it… Look, there’s even a bit of purple over here, too. It’s actually very good.”

James turns the paper from one side to another multiple more times, as if a secret message might sprout on one of them if he was determined enough. “It doesn’t say anything, though. Not even whom it’s from…

…

Would you like—”


End file.
